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Friday, August 29, 2014

HOW TO REWIRE YOUR BRAIN FOR GREATER HAPPINESS

THE
BAD NEWS: OUR BRAINS ARE WIRED TO BE NEGATIVE. THE GOOD NEWS: YOU CAN
TRAIN YOUR BRAIN TO HOLD ON TO HAPPINESS IN 10 SECONDS.

Wouldn’t
it be awesome if we could hack into our own brains and rewire them to
be happier?

Science
has shown we actually can thanks to a phenomenon called
experience-dependent neuroplasticity. "It’s a fancy term to
say the brain learns from our experiences," says Rick
Hanson,
neuropsychologist and author of the book Hardwiring
Happiness.
"As we understand better and better how this brain works, it
gives us more power to change our mind for the better."

Hanson
assures he isn't just talking new-age mumbo jumbo. "This is not
just 'smell the roses,'" he says. "I am talking about
positive neuroplasticity. I am talking about learning. … The brain
is changing based on what flows through it."

Understanding
how our brains function can help us better control them. Here are
some key takeaways from Hanson on how our brains work when it comes
to wiring for happiness:

RECOGNIZE
YOUR NEGATIVITY BIAS.

Our
brains are awesome at overlearning from negative experiences. "The
brain continuously scans for bad news," says Hanson. "As
soon as it finds the bad news, it overly focuses on it."

Think
of where we've evolved from and this starts to make a lot of sense.
"Our ancestors evolved in really harsh conditions," he
says. Negativity bias is really good for animals surviving in the
wild. It's what Hanson calls the "eat lunch don’t be lunch"
mentality. But these days, we aren't exactly running from predators,
yet our brains are still functioning as if we're in the wild.

Try
not to overlearn from your negative experiences. That means if you
get a performance review from your boss, for example, and he tells
you countless positive things about your work and one bit of
criticism, don't obsess (as we often tend to) on the one negative
thing. "The brain is like a garden, except its soil is very
fertile for weeds," says Hanson.

Realistic
thinking means noticing the good things that happen to us as they
occur and letting ourselves experience them. "We tend to not
even notice a good fact when its there," he says. "The boss
actually said 19 good things about you, but you're obsessing over the
one bad thing."

KNOW
WHAT'S GOING ON IN THE BRAIN.

Say
you're in a meeting and you get acknowledged for something you've
said or called out for the great work you've done. In that moment of
being valued, neuro-psychologically there is a particular activation
of synapses--the tiny connections between cells that allow neurons to
pass on electrical
and chemical signals.

"When
we talk about the neural basis for feeling valued, we are talking
about an activated coalition of billions of synapses," says
Hanson. "As they fire together, they start wiring together."

When
those synapses are firing, they become more sensitive and new
synopses start to form. That means the next time you feel valued, the
positive feelings experienced in that moment will be a little
stronger.

FOLLOW
THE 10-SECOND RULE.

It's
important to let yourself linger in the moment of a positive
experience--not just because it feels good (though that should be
reason enough), but because you're actually helping rewire your brain
in that moment. For most people, it's hard to have positive
experiences for more than few seconds. Think about how quickly you
push away a compliment rather than letting yourself really feel good
about it. But brushing aside positive experiences rather than
internalizing them literally doesn't allow you to transfer the
positive feelings associated from your short- to long-term memory,
says Hanson.

"People
tend to be really good at having that beneficial state of mind in the
first place, but they don’t take the extra 10 seconds required for
the transfer to occur from short-term memory buffers to long-term
storage," he says. "Really get those neurons firing
together so that they wire this growing inner strength in your
brain."

THINK
OF YOUR BRAIN LIKE A CASSETTE RECORDER.

Making
a change in your brain is a two-stage process and it doesn't happen
overnight, to be sure. You first have to allow yourself to have
certain positive thoughts or experiences, play them out fully in your
brain and let them register. "The brain is old-school,"
says Hanson. "It's like a cassette recorder. You record the song
by playing it."

The
changes associated with this are gradual. Think of it kind of like an
interest rate. "An annualized interest rate of 5% or 6% is not
great, but that small percentage accumulating every day over time can
make a big difference," says Hanson.

WHY
GO THROUGH THE HASSLE?

Our
brains are working just fine, you might be thinking. Why mess with
something that's not broken? But the fact of the matter is happiness
isn't something that happens to you. It's something you can teach
your brain to experience more fully.

"We
should not fool ourselves," says Hanson. "We've got a brain
that is pulled together to help lizards, mice, and monkeys get
through the day and pass on their genes. We've got a brain that's
like Velcro for the bad and Teflon for the good. Be muscular from the
inside out. Grow the good stuff inside yourself."

CAT 2014 is likely to be a more competitive and extensive
exam

The average
difficulty level is likely to remain at par with earlier CATs

The
widely taken Common Aptitude Test ( CAT) for admission to most
acclaimed B- schools is set to be very different from the previous
CATs, after the changes announced by the convening committee. The
tough entrance exam will see changes in the form of a new structure
— a two-day test window with four test slots, more questions, an
early-November date — and a test creator. All of these have
significant implications on how a student must approach the test.
This means that applicants will have to follow a course correction
in their preparation for the D-day. It’s time to reset your
pointers to prepare for the new pattern.

The
new version of the CAT is a gruelling three-hour exercise. To excel,
appear for at least 20 full-length mock tests in the 100 days before
the test.

Every
competitive exam has its own unique character with features such as
the structure, the content, including both width and depth and the
testing environment. CAT will be held over a two day slot on
November 16 and November 22. Here is an analysis of the changes in
CAT, along with tips for the exam that is only 100 days away.

Structure:
The structure of the exam determines the testtaking strategy. The
change has three significant elements

Increase
in the number of questions

Increase
in the time limit to 170 minutes No sectional time limits Since the
launch of the computer-based test for mat five years back, the
number of questions appearing in CAT has been only about 2/ 3rd of
the last few paper-based CATs. This means that 40 t o 45 attempts
are good enough for a decent percentile. Thereby, the psychological
barrier that you need to cross to be in the zone of the call getters
is reduced.

In
the current format, you must aim at 60 to 65 attempts. Your ability
to get to this level will be aided by the fact that you will have
more questions to choose from. However, to take advantage of this,
make sure that you practice a wide range of topics.

You
will have to start by moving your target questions from 40 to 50 in
a time frame. Then gradually, push it to over 60 as you practice
further. The bottom line is: You move from a scenario where you
spent 140 seconds on a question to about 100 seconds per question.

The
new version of CAT is a 170- minute affair. That makes it a
gruelling three to three-and-a-half hours of focus. Stamina can be
built only through “sustained” practice in simulated situations.
To be at the peak of your performance through the 170 minutes, work
on as many mocks as possible. Completing 20 mocks in the span of
these 100 days is a good aim. In CAT preparation, it is undeniable
that testing in itself is inadequate unless backed by thorough
analysis and feedback.

The
most challenging and probably game changing element is t he “no
sectional t i me l i mit” f or mat, which has been i ntroduced f
rom this year. It changes the test from a knowledge check - ing
paradigm to an aptitude checking paradigm.

The
key to good performance will lie in how well you play your
strengths. T his will include your knowledge of the subjects, the
questions that you have chosen and your time management skills.
Adequate practice will ensure that you get your strategy right. A
few questions that you must ask yourself while taking a mock test—
Which questions first? How much time to devote to which section? How
many rounds of attempts?

Content:
Would there be a significant change in content? It is unlikely. It
is true that the test creator has more options for framing
questions. The IIMs themselves would be very closely associated with
the test designing process.

It
is advised to get used to the types of questions that have been seen
in the previous CATs, when an in-house body used to conduct the
test. The average level of the paper is likely to stay at par with
the earlier CATs. While it is imperative that you include all types
of questions in your mocks, make sure that you know the previous CAT
papers well.

Test
environment: The tests are going to be conducted in 99 cities and in
not more than four time slots. This could mean a lot for the student
as well as for CAT, as an exam. If done carefully, the test can
bring back the credibility of the CAT scores. Most of us know about
the scores fiasco i n CAT 2013 and t he subsequent litigation.
Hopefully for the IIMs, these positive changes in the test will
encourage more students to appear for it. Stay prepared for a more
competitive CAT.

There
is no option for students to choose time slots for this test. So
when to book your slot is no longer relevant. Compiled by HT140827

MEETINGS
WANT TO SUCK. WREST CONTROL OF THEM WITH THIS SEVEN-STEP STRATEGY.

You
know when a meeting turns into a complete waste of time? Maybe you’re
trying to come up with ideas, or make a decision. Before anyone
realizes it, the meeting starts to suck.

Meetings
want to suck. Two of their favorite suckiness tactics are group
brainstorming and group negotiation. Give them half a chance, and
they’ll waste your time, sap your energy,
and leave you with poor ideas and a watered-down decision. But
meetings don't have to be that way.

On
the Google
Ventures design
team, we dislike sucky meetings as much as anyone. We use a process
hack that short-circuits the worst parts of groupthink while getting
the most out of different perspectives. For lack of a better name, we
call it the “note-and-vote.”

The
next time you need to make a decision or come up with a new idea in a
group, call timeout and give the note-and-vote a try.

HOW
IT WORKS

1.
Note

Distribute
paper and pens to each person. Set a timer for five minutes to 10
minutes. Everyone writes down as many ideas as they can.
Individually. Quietly. This list won’t be shared with the group, so
nobody has to worry about writing down dumb ideas.

2.
Self-edit

Set
the timer for two minutes. Each person reviews his or her own list
and picks one or two favorites. Individually. Quietly.

3.
Share and capture

One
at a time, each person shares his or her top idea(s). No sales pitch.
Just say what you wrote and move on. As you go, one person writes
everybody’s ideas on the whiteboard.

4.
Vote

Set
the timer for five minutes. Each person chooses a favorite from the
ideas on the whiteboard. Individually. Quietly. You must commit your
vote to paper.

5.
Share and capture

One
at a time, each person says their vote. A short sales pitch may be
permissible, but no changing your vote! Say what you wrote. Write the
votes on the whiteboard. Dots work well.

6.
Decide

Who
is the decider? She should make the final call--not the group. She
can choose to respect the votes or not. This is less awkward than it
sounds: instead of dancing around people’s opinions and feelings,
you’ve made the mechanics plain. Everyone’s voice was heard.

7.
Rejoice. That only took 15 minutes!

The
note-and-vote isn’t perfect (remember, I said “pretty good
decisions”). But it is fast. And it’s quite likely better than
what you’d get with two hours of the old way.

You
might want to adapt the specifics to suit the problem and your team.
Sometimes multiple votes per person are helpful. Sometimes sales
pitches give crucial insight. We often jump right to voting when
there's a finite list of options. So long as you do most of the
thinking individually, you’ll see a big efficiency boost.

WHY
IT WORKS

Quiet
time to think

Meetings
rarely offer individuals time to focus and think. Group
brainstorms--where everyone shouts out ideas and builds off one
another--can be fun, but in my experience, the strongest ideas always
come from individuals.

Parallel
is better than serial

Normal
meetings are serial. In other words, one person is talking at a time,
and someone is always talking. That means there’s one thread of
thought for the length of the meeting. Parallel work increases your
bandwidth. More solutions are considered and evaluated.

Voting
commitment

Writing
down your vote ensures that you won’t be swayed when someone else
you respect votes for something else. This is a social hack--we
naturally want to make other people feel good and form consensus in
meetings. Conflict is useful.

We’ve
used the note-and-vote for everything from naming companies to
choosing product features, and from setting a meeting agenda to
picking a restaurant for lunch.

The Entrepreneurship Coach

Ernesto
Sirolli has spent 30 years helping people find the resources they
need to start businesses and make them thrive. He and the people
he’s trained have been instrumental in launching more than 40,000
enterprises in 250 communities and 25 countries. Curiosity,
commitment, and the willingness to spend time in some of the most
remote locations on earth have given him unusual insight into what
successful entrepreneurs do well. Above all, he advises business
leaders to shut up and listen.

In
fact, “Want to Help Someone? Shut Up and Listen” was the title of
Sirolli’s TED Talk in 2012. Originally delivered at a regional TEDx
in rural New Zealand, his presentation was posted to the main TED
website and garnered nearly 2 million views, bringing worldwide
attention to his work. Speaking in heavily accented Italian, and in
his characteristic tone of wry simplicity, Sirolli recounted his
early experiences working for an Italian NGO that specialized in
economic development. After earning his laurea
di dottore in
political science from the University of Rome—the highest graduate
degree offered in Italy at the time—he set off in the early 1970s
full of idealism to work in impoverished communities in Algeria, the
Ivory Coast, Kenya, Somalia, and Zambia.

“Everything
we touched, we killed,” he says, evoking slightly nervous laughter
from the TED audience. “Every project we did, every single one of
them, failed.” He describes, for example, how his team decided to
teach Zambians how to grow food in the beautiful fertile valley where
they had always lived as pastoralists, shepherding animals but
planting nothing. The team imported seeds from Italy—tomatoes and
zucchini—but the locals didn’t seem interested. The team tried to
pay them money, but there was little in the valley available to buy.
Finally, the NGO started importing whiskey and beer in order to coax
the men into the fields. “We kept thinking, what is wrong with
these people?”

It
soon became apparent. The tomatoes appeared on the vines, huge
bursting fruits that put the most bountiful Italian crops to shame.
The team members were joyful, but the next morning they awoke to find
every single one of the plants gone. Hippos had swarmed up from the
river and begun gorging. The Italians ran to tell the Zambians what
had happened. “Of course,” said the people. “That’s why we
don’t plant in the valley.”

“Why
didn’t you tell us?”
asked the Italians.

“Because
you never asked,” came the response.

The
experience was painful. “I thought we Italians were good people,
and I wondered how we could fail so badly,” says Sirolli. “Was it
for these ‘results’ that we had hooked the community on whiskey
and beer? So I began looking around at other projects that had been
done in Africa—by the English, the Americans, the French—hoping
to get ideas. And I realized, at least we fed the hippos. Other
million-dollar projects just left rubbish behind. Everywhere I saw
the same problem: Our well-intentioned efforts failed because we
didn’t listen to the people we were trying to help.”

Challenging
Entrepreneurs to Succeed

The
story of Sirolli’s experiences in Africa is told in his
book, Ripples
from the Zambezi: Passion, Entrepreneurship, and the Rebirth of Local
Economies (New
Society Publishers, 1999). Now used as a text in many community and
economic development courses, Ripples offers
three essential messages about economic development. First, all
effective development ideas need to come from local people rather
than “experts,” no matter how well-meaning or informed these
experts might be. Second, most efforts to motivate people are
fruitless; rather, those trying to help local enterprise must wait
until entrepreneurs ask for help, then connect them with the
resources they need. And third, entrepreneurs should never be
encouraged to act in isolation on their dreams, because doing so will
increase their chances of failure and cause them to question their
own capacities.

This
last concept is important and informs Sirolli’s ideas about
development and the nature of enterprise. With a methodology
developed over years of challenging real-world conditions, Sirolli is
pushing back against what he sees as the all-too-prevalent myth of
the celebrity entrepreneur as go-it-alone individualist. “Instead
of writing biographies, the business media is often publishing
hagiography: hero stories about geniuses who do it all on their own,”
he says. “But when you look at the real story, whether it’s Steve
Jobs or Bill Gates or Sam Walton or [Thomas] Edison or the owner of a
chain of dry cleaners, you see none of them did it alone. They all
had [groups of colleagues] who could do the things they couldn’t
do. The way it’s presented is very dishonest. My work now is to
oppose this fake mythology and show that enterprise really succeeds
when the right people come together.”

It
led Sirolli to cofound the Sirolli Institute, a global social
enterprise in Sacramento, Calif., that is dedicated to revitalizing
communities by fostering entrepreneurship. In Sirolli’s view, this
is a calling of the highest order. If communities devastated by
industrial decline or isolated from global supply chains are to
flourish and create sufficient jobs, local entrepreneurs need to
succeed. Young people, he notes, are particularly inspired by a
vision of responsive, grassroots growth, of going where they can and
working with what they find to create products and services of
distinctive value. Supporting them and helping them find what they
need to thrive is the essential first step to healing communities.

Sirolli’s
method for supporting such endeavors involves training “enterprise
facilitators” (EFs) in each locale. These are individuals who work
for either the community or a development agency and whose sole
mission is to help entrepreneurs identify and find needed resources.
He has trained about 185 EFs, located around the world. “These
people don’t work for me, and they don’t work for the people they
help,” he says. They work for government agencies or companies
committed to local development, which pay them directly. “For most
of them, it’s a full-time job.”

Making
the Business Beautiful

On
a bright afternoon at a Starbucks just outside downtown
Sacramento—where Sirolli and his wife and business partner, Martha
Sirolli (executive director of the institute), live—he is waiting
to meet an entrepreneur. He rarely works directly with entrepreneurs
anymore, and he seems to welcome the chance to exercise his skills
directly, as a college president might look forward to teaching a
class.

“There
are two rules for enterprise facilitation,” he declares. “First,
your relationship with the client is sacred and entirely
confidential. Second, you treat the client as an adult. That means
the client gets to decide whether and when to act on what you
discuss. It’s not your role to monitor how that person is doing or
hold him or her to a timeline. For that reason, you never call the
client, you only call the client back.
To be passive is the foundation of this work, and that’s why it’s
difficult. It takes discipline to resist the impulse to do, to tell,
to solve, to intervene.”

He
adds that he trains facilitators to be conscious of every gesture.
They must signal that the facilitator is someone to confide in: a
resource rather than an authority figure. “You meet your client in
a coffee shop, not an office. You don’t take notes during the
meeting. You sit shoulder to shoulder and get the client to draw
something and then look at it together. [These signals] create a
feeling of collaboration.”

Sirolli’s
father was a doctor, first in a small Italian village and later in
Rome, and he finds a strong parallel between the two practices. “I
see enterprise facilitators as the family doctors of business. The EF
is basically a diagnostician. You help diagnose what an entrepreneur
needs and suggest ways to find the right resources. It’s not your
job to follow up. If my father saw a patient smoking in the piazza
the day after a consultation in which smoking had been discussed, he
would not even let it show that he noticed. It was up to the patient
to change his behavior.”

Then
the entrepreneur arrives. Ben Aller is a handsome, athletic young man
wearing an air of anxiety. He thanks Sirolli for meeting him and
explains that his company builds custom environments for zoos, which
enables him to fuse his passion for design with his love of animals.
For almost a decade, Aller ran the fabrication shop for a major zoo
supplier in Arizona, but he was frequently told he was too interested
in his work. “I kept hearing stuff like ‘You don’t really need
to know about the mating habits of shrews to do this project.’ My
enthusiasm didn’t seem to be a plus.” In 2004, he returned home
to Sacramento and set up an exhibit business of his own, including a
manufacturing center on a friend’s ranch.

“It’s
been a struggle,” he says. “The selling part takes time away from
designing and building. Plus it can take two years between initial
contact with a client and when you get a check.” The previous year,
Pixar Animation Studios contracted with Aller to build artificial
branches for a reptile house, a complex job that took four months,
during which time he had to turn down other work. This was followed
by six months without a job. “Clients love my product, but the
business feels like it’s built on sand.”

Sirolli
asks Aller what he is good at, and what he isn’t good at. “I have
great ideas and my work is the highest quality and original, but I’m
not a good marketer or money manager. I don’t actually likemoney,
but I need money to reach my goal, which is creating zoo exhibits
that connect animals and people.”

“Tell
me, who is helping you? Who is working with you? Come sit beside me
and draw me a picture of your supporters.”

Aller
pulls out a pen. “I have my mom, but she doesn’t have any money.
I have my friend Jay, a kind of father figure, whose ranch I work on.
He lets me use his equipment and gives me lots of support. Plus a
landscape designer and animal artist—both great—who I had to lay
off.”

“It
takes three people to make a business,” Sirolli says, “those who
know product, marketing, and financial management. This is the
trinity of business. Who are these people for you?”

“If
you put it that way, almost everyone is product. For financial
management, I have nobody. For marketing, only a part-time Web guy.”

Sirolli
notes that most product people cannot double as marketing people.
“Product people believe they can sell because once they’re in
front of a customer, they [will] blow [the customer] away with their
passion. But an occasional blown-away customer does not make a
business. There has to be someone who screens 100 prospects so you
can get before the right ones. If you don’t have that, it’s a
waste of time. You shouldn’t be doing sales unless a marketing
person sets it up.”

“But
I can’t afford to hire a marketing person,” says Ben Aller.

“You
don’t need to hire someone. Did Steve Jobs hire Steve Wozniak? Did
Bill Gates hire Paul Allen? No, they went into business together.
Businesses are founded on relationships, and you don’t have the
relationships you need to be a business. So finding your people is
your job.”

“My
problem is money.”

“No,
your problem is trying to do everything yourself. You have to say, ‘I
am the sultan of zoo fabrication, and my job is to form a team that
can take my products to the world and make sure they pay.’ Then you
look for a marketer who is so good she will work on commission
because she knows she can bring in clients. The right person is out
there. Maybe she’s in a horrible job or has been laid off. Maybe
she’s just starting her career. You give her a list of all the
contacts you’ve built up and offer her a good commission plus 30
percent of your business. Then you bring in a financial manager the
same way.”

“How
do I find them?”

“Ah,
this part you will like! Marketing people and financial managers are
like animals—they live in habitats. So go and hunt, turn over the
rocks as you would when looking for lizards. Identify which habitats
you need to explore. Call your friends in zoos and ask them to give
you the name of the best marketing person they have ever met. Go to
animal volunteer societies and ask about people who have experience
in marketing. For finance, go to the bank or ask your friend Jay—he
probably has some white-haired guy he plays golf with who could meet
you a few times a year. Go to these people with such passion for your
product that they are inspired to work with you.”

“I
like the idea of habitats, and I love the idea of going to zoos—why
didn’t I think of that?”

“Because
you weren’t seeing that your real job is to build friendships so
you can stop drowning in solitude.” Aller replies that the lack of
money still feels like a pressing issue. “If you had money now,”
says Sirolli, “it would only help you to fail faster. You’d spend
it creating new products you couldn’t sell. I want to give you an
image: Your company has to be as beautiful as your product. Right now
you have great products but a weak company. It won’t change until
you find your people.”

From
Australia to Esperance

After
leaving the Italian NGO in the 1970s, Sirolli came under the
influence of E.F. Schumacher’s 1973 classic Small
Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (Harper
& Row), an influential book that championed the use of
appropriate technologies and questioned the then-unchallenged belief
that bigger is better and progress is always measured in numerical
growth.

He
was also influenced by Abraham Maslow’s work on psychologically
healthy individuals. One of the first psychologists to insist that
psychology could benefit healthy people, Maslow noted that the wisest
individuals he met seemed to be following Nietzsche’s injunction to
“become what thou art.” Maslow described this drive as
“self-actualization” and put it at the summit of his influential
“hierarchy of needs.” The drive to realize one’s potential was
more significant than the need for food, shelter, and love. To
Sirolli, Maslow’s insight confirmed the importance of intrinsic
motivation: The best way to support social and economic growth was to
help people do what they wanted to do, instead of presenting them
with preconceived projects or promising more transactional rewards.

The
best way to support social and economic growth was to help people do
what they wanted to do.

Sirolli
moved to Perth, Australia, in 1979, eager to put into practice the
ideas he’d been incubating. Inspired in part by the concept of
self-actualization, he enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Murdoch
University; his goal was to study how the principles of humanistic
psychology could be adapted to economic development. For his
demonstration project, he persuaded the town of Fremantle, south of
Perth, to give him US$1,025 (AUS$900) for a job-creation project.

At
a local craft market, he observed a number of young people who were
“putting a lot of effort into making terrible ugly sandals that
nobody wanted to buy.” Scouring the region for someone who could
help them improve their skills, he discovered a Sicilian immigrant, a
shoemaker since the age of 14, who made surgical boots for the local
hospital to suit people with foot deformities or serious injuries.
Sirolli introduced the shoemaker to the five most dedicated sandal
makers, helped the group locate space in the basement of a local
furniture factory, and spent the minimal funds he had secured buying
tools. Thus was born the Fremantle Shoemakers’ Cooperative. The
venture lasted 10 years and turned the town into a center for the
manufacture of orthopedic footwear—as well as fashionable shoes
made from kangaroo hides that had formerly been exported to Italy for
luxury brands.

A
television documentary on the success of the venture caught the
attention of the minister for regional development in Perth. He was
looking to boost the prospects of Esperance, a coastal village
nearby. The region had been in sharp decline since the government
introduced quotas on tuna in response to overfishing. The minister
offered Sirolli a plane ticket and keys to a government apartment.

In
Esperance, Sirolli began inviting local people for coffee, always
asking the same question: “Do you know anyone who is thinking of
starting a business?” He was always told no. The problem in
Esperance, he kept hearing, was that people were too lazy and too
well looked after by the government to have any interest in working
for themselves—most of the fishermen who’d lost business had gone
on the dole. Eventually, a group of fishermen came to Sirolli to ask
if he could help them figure out how to get a better price for their
tuna. Since the catch quotas had been put into effect, the harvests
had become too small to support them at the commodity prices for
which the tuna was sold.

Sirolli
persuaded five fishermen to contribute $228 of their own money to
commission a study to see how they might sell their fish at a higher
profit. They learned that tuna sold to local Japanese restaurants for
sashimi fetched 10 times as much as the 68 cents per kilo they’d
been getting. Sirolli then helped the group secure a $1,140 loan from
a ministerial discretionary fund so they could learn the precise
methods required to prepare tuna for the sale. He connected them with
the head of a local technical college who put on sashimi handling
demonstrations, and they used some of the money to fly a Japanese
chef in from Perth to train them.

This
was the start of an explosion of local activity that eventually led
to Esperance’s becoming a prime supplier of superior-grade sashimi,
not just to Japanese restaurants in Australia but to suppliers in
Japan. Since the Japanese paid a full $17 per kilo for their product,
the fishermen now earned more money than they had before the
institution of the quotas.

Their
success inspired a group of farmers, who figured “if those idiot
fishermen can do it,” they should
be able to address two of their own difficulties—getting a better
price for their sheep and stopping soil erosion. Sirolli got each of
the farmers to contribute $114 to commission a study on a new
approach to selling mutton and found two young agronomists to look at
how the value chain for old ewes could be enriched. The team came up
with a cost-effective way of making use of the sheepskins. Sirolli
also brokered a meeting with a local environmentalist—formerly
viewed by the farmers as “the enemy”—who helped them identify
commercial uses for the native scrub that grew on their marginal land
and find an instructor to start a class in re-vegetation at a local
college. Within a short time, the farmers had both expanded their
business and stopped soil erosion.

Business-Centered
Therapy

Sirolli
has achieved this kind of success by adapting methods pioneered by
Carl Rogers, the founder of “person-centered therapy” and a major
influence on organizational development. Rogers’s clinical work
demonstrated that a therapist could help people heal by simply “being
there,” offering witness and support. “Rogers basically invented
facilitation,” says Sirolli. “He believed a counselor’s sole
job was to remove obstacles so a patient could resume normal growth.
He told his students, ‘You don’t
do the work, you let your patients do it. You’re there to honor
their innate wish to grow.’”

Using
Rogers’s technique with entrepreneurs represents a radical
departure from ordinary business development. “For one thing,”
Sirolli notes, “few programs emphasize one-on-one work with
entrepreneurs, preferring to focus on infrastructural support such as
microloans, literacy, and training. Also, most programs require
entrepreneurs to complete a business plan before applying
for funding, even though there’s little connection between the
ability to write a plan and [the ability to] run a business. Finally,
a lot of programs supply money. Our practice is to never do that, on
the theory that an entrepreneur with a good plan and the right team
will have little problem finding money.” The real challenge of the
method, he says, is “being comfortable enough to wait, to resist
the temptation to step in. That’s tough in our action-crazy
culture.”

Sirolli’s
success drew national interest. The Australian government provided
money to train “another Ernesto” to continue in Esperance so he
could move on and start more projects. “They sent me a wonderful
young guy, and the training took place in the back of a station
wagon. I told him, ‘There are just two things you should never do.
Don’t initiate anything yourself, and never try to motivate
people.’” The newly anointed EF objected that it would be a
disaster to rely on locals for ideas, but promised to do “nothing”
until given different instructions. Within two months, he had 46
projects under way.

Mining
and Communities

By
the late 1990s, Sirolli was in demand throughout Australia and New
Zealand—surfacing ideas, brokering relationships, training
facilitators, and finishing his book. Around this same time, he met
his second wife, Martha Sirolli, and they began working together.
Sirolli worked for a Minnesota development agency, then with a
federal enterprise zone in South Dakota, and ultimately with the
institute that he and Martha cofounded when they later moved to
Sacramento. In every venue, he followed his practice of drinking
“bottomless cups of coffee” with the locals and helping those who
were motivated find resources to start viable businessess.

Ripples
from the Zambezi found
an avid reader in Bruce Harvey, an exploratory geologist who
negotiated land access for the Melbourne-based mining giant Rio
Tinto. “Ripples spoke
to me, because in mining we need to be concerned with the long-term
viability of communities where we open mines, which for the most part
have little in the way of physical or social infrastructure,”
Harvey says. In other words, a giant mining company entering a local
area could learn something valuable from the example of a
social-entrepreneurship catalyst like Sirolli.

n
the past, we promised communities that if they let us come in and
create a modern economy, they’d get to participate and reap the
benefits,” says Harvey. But it didn’t work that way. “Mining
and petroleum are capital-intensive industries that don’t produce
many jobs. Plus, most of our workers have specialized skills and must
be brought in from elsewhere. So we need a different model for
helping people who live near our mines sustain some kind of
livelihood. If we can’t do that, they’ll end up throwing us
out—maybe not right away, but after a generation or two. The work
Ernesto described in Esperance and Fremantle—places I knew—offered
a different approach, one based on local talents, ideas, and
ambitions.”

Harvey
asked Sirolli to keynote the annual conference of the Minerals
Council of Australia, the industry’s chief trade group, in 2007.
The purpose was to present an alternative to the top-down,
engineering-based model of development that resource companies had
traditionally pursued—bringing in well-paid consultants to teach
resource-starved local people how to do jobs the consultants thought
they should do. “Ernesto showed us how we could help local people
identify businesses they wanted
to start. He told us to listen instead of commissioning studies.”

Sirolli,
for his part, saw a huge opportunity for helping mining companies
become real partners in development. In his speech at the conference,
he invited the executives to “imagine if people wanted your company
to work with them because they knew this would improve their
community! You’d be invited to bid on projects instead of having
communities organizing against you.” The speech created a stir.
Until that point, most of his work had been with governments,
development agencies, and nonprofit organizations; now industrial
companies also started to seek him out. He began a series of seminars
on enterprise development for mining executives, and accepted a
fellowship at the University of Queensland to teach corporate social
responsibility in resource-intensive industries. With sponsorship
from mining and energy companies, he set up training for enterprise
facilitators in communities where natural resources were being
developed, as diverse as Canadian tribal lands, remote villages in
Indonesia and Wales, and rural U.S. communities where shale oil was
being produced.

Bruce
Harvey, who had been promoted to global practice leader in community
and social performance for Rio Tinto, brought Sirolli in to work at
Oyu Tolgoi in southern Mongolia, site of one of the world’s largest
copper mines. “The NGOs in the area wanted to help the local
people,” recalls Harvey, “but they were proposing things like
chicken farms, which are totally alien to Gobi culture. Ernesto came
out and said, ‘Don’t propose anything, just get people talking.
Thenthey can
figure out how what they want to do might pay.’”

Sure
enough, listening revealed an opportunity: developing a market for
wool from the two-humped Bactrian camel, a fiber renowned for its
softness, warmth, durability, and strength. “It’s potentially a
very lucrative product,” says Harvey, “but it was being treated
as a commodity, like ordinary wool. The locals mostly just lopped off
the dirty camel hair any which way with scissors, tossed it into
bags, and sold it in bulk to Chinese traders. That left most of the
value on the table.” The enterprise facilitators helped the local
farmers discover how they could add value at every step. They sheared
the wool carefully with tools that kept the strands intact. Then they
cleaned, sorted, combed, and wove it, doing the finish work required
to create a beautiful luxury fabric sought out by designers all over
the world.

Small
Interventions

One
of Sirolli’s current goals is to work with business schools to
shift the nature of entrepreneurial education. “Most schools teach
entrepreneurs that they must have all the
skills—product, marketing, financial management. They reward
students for putting together a go-it-alone business plan instead of
collaborating or identifying who they need to start a business with.
In this way, [the schools] often set their students up for failure.
If, instead, schools could provide enterprise facilitators, they
could help students figure out what they really need to get started.”

Sirolli
had not realized until his 2012 TED talk that his methods could have
value for established organizations. “I now hear from so many
businesspeople. An entrepreneur from Florida just flew to Sacramento
to see me. He said, ‘I’ve been very successful, but I realized I
don’t really know what people in my companies are capable of
doing.’ I said, ‘Do you realize that among the people you employ
there are some with beautiful dreams that you could invest in? This
would be an organic way to grow your business.’”

Sirolli
believes that enterprise facilitators will always have an advantage
over planners and development boards because they avoid
over-investment and don’t choose which projects to support.
Instead, they help people identify impediments that stand in the way
of translating their dreams into businesses so they can move forward.
By making small interventions on hundreds of projects, EFs avoid the
pitfall of trying to pick winners. Because nobody can predict
tomorrow’s market, Sirolli notes, “Economies that rely on a few
starters and products will always be vulnerable. The nations with the
broadest catchment areas will be leaders.”

Or,
to quote Peter Drucker, “Innovative opportunities do not come with
the tempest but with the rustling of the breeze.” Helping small
businesses offers a way to fan that breeze.

The app for your h‘app’iness

From
tracking your sleep pattern to combating negativities, there are a
number of applications that help you beat lifestyle stress.

THE
APPS HELP YOU REDUCE STRESS, COMBAT NEGATIVE ENERGIES AND BOOST
OPTIMISM, BESIDES ENCOURAGING OPEN-MINDEDNESS SLEEP DISORDER IS A
COMMON PROBLEM THESE DAYS. A NUMBER OF APPS AND DEVICES ARE
AVAILABLE TO HELP YOU MONITOR SLEEP

Happiness
is a state of mind. And the key to it is relaxation and finding joy
in things around you. Sure, it depends on you, but there are some
apps to help you become happier. Skeptical? We were, too. But a
closer look showed that some of them do work!

HAPPIFY
[iOS app and website: www.happify.com]

Available
on the iPhone and as a website, Happify is a platform that uses
quick activities and games based on a set of questions on how happy
you have been in the last week, as well as your present state of
mind. The activities help you reduce stress, combat negative
energies and boost optimism and self esteem, besides encouraging
open-mindedness.

Based
on psychological research from leading academic institutions, the
activities are personalised for you. If you like it, and want to do
more activities, you can also buy a premium version, starting at

`
270 a month for a 2-year package and ` 790 a month if you pay per
month.

HAPPIER

[iOS
and Android - free]

This
app is more of a journal. According to research, if you record happy
moments of your life — from bumping into an old friend to a pretty
sunset you watched, or just a cup of coffee with someone that gave
you joy — the celebration of these “wins’ has a power to
motivate and ignite joy. The app lets you record these moments,
either privately or in a public mode.

A
number of people around you, irrespective of whether they are your
friends or not, will also show up in a feed. For example, someone
may share the joy of their child mak- ing his/her first drawing,
someone may feel happy after buying their first car — put this all
into the journal, and it will help you build a happier nature.

In
addition, Happier also offers courses on its website, from building
7 happier habits over a 7-day period or 7-days of outdoor walks and
meditations. These courses cost anywhere from a one-time fee of `
1,200 or a monthly fee of ` 600.

SMILING
MIND

[iOS
and Web]

Designed
primarily for the youth, Smiling Mind calls itself a modern
meditation designed to bring balance into young lives. It allows you
to specify your age group, starting as early as 7-11 years, going up
to 16-22. You can choose an individual programme and also add
education or sports to it. You can sign-up for a meditation session
or set up a reminder for a later date.

The
first meditation gets you into the mood with a 5-minute body scan,
which relaxes your mind. There are several others as well that help
you improve awareness of mind, body and all the senses — and all
for free! You can even download these meditations and use them when
you are on a holiday and not connected to the Internet.

SLEEP
BOT [iOS and Android]

Sleep
disorder is a common problem these days. A number of apps and
devices are available to help you monitor sleep, but Sleep Bot does
things slightly differently. Launch the app when you are ready to
sleep and it will shut off music, put your phone on silent or
airplane mode if you choose to.

While
you sleep, the app will record your sleeping time, movement – you
just need to put the phone next to your pillow, and it even records
sounds such as your partner’s snoring, or the neighbour’s dog
barking in the middle of the night! Want to wake up at 5AM? Set the
alarm and the app will wake you up in a 30-minute window where it
senses your sleep to be the lightest. All data is automatically sent
to mysleepbot.com, and you can track your sleep movements and make
notes.

Thursday, August 28, 2014

All you need to know about cap on free ATM transactions

The
RBI's decision to cut the number of free transactions on other banks'
ATMs will have widespread ramifications. Starting 1 November, if you
conduct more than three transactions on other banks' ATMs in a month,
you will be charged Rs 20 per transaction. The apex bank has also
allowed banks to charge customers if they use their own bank ATMs
more than five times a month. This applies to transactions in six
metros: Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Bangalore and
Hyderabad.

The
silver lining in the new rules on ATM usage is that the charge
structure has been harmonised. Before the RBI decided in 2009 to make
five ATM transactions free, banks used to charge anything between Rs
15 and Rs 60 per transaction at another bank's ATM. This was later
revised to Rs 20 per withdrawal and Rs 9 for non-financial
transactions. Banks have been lobbying for the introduction of
charges on ATM usage ever since the RBI allowed this.

Thankfully,
the RBI has not permitted banks to have their way and retained the
cap on charges for withdrawals.

While
Rs 20 per transaction is not exactly usurious, it can add up to a
sizeable amount every month if you are not careful about your cash
flow. With careful planning, you can avoid paying the ATM charges
beyond the free transactions. However, don't go overboard trying to
avoid the ATM charge. For instance, keeping a lot of cash at home to
save on ATM fees could prove counter-productive. In your effort to
save Rs 20 in transaction fee, you may lose a few hundred rupees in
interest.

Besides,
it is possible that your bank does not levy charges for using ATMs
frequently. For instance, preferred customers, who hold a large bank
balance or have made investments through the bank, could be allowed
more than three free transactions a month at other ATMs and an
unlimited use of the bank's own teller machines. The change comes at
a time when banks are adopting technology at a furious pace. Most
banks now offer customers the facility of knowing their account
balance or getting a mini statement through an SMS or phone banking.
So, avoid using the ATM for nonfinancial transactions that can be
done through other channels.6
ways to avoid high ATM chargesHere's
how you can avoid the charges that are likely to kick in from 1
November 2014.

Use
cards wherever possibleYour
first weapon against ATM charges is the plastic in your wallet. Use
your debit and credit cards so that you don't need too much cash. Be
alert when you do this. Some establishments charge 1-2% of the amount
as transaction fee, which will defeat the purpose of using the cards.
There is also the danger of overspending if you use plastic money for
every purchase.Plan
your cash flow betterDon't
wait till you are broke to withdraw money from the ATM. Give yourself
a buffer of 2-3 days by indulging in advance planning. In this
manner, you won't be forced to use another bank's ATM. While
withdrawing cash, take out more than the amount you need immediately.
Take into account the expenses during the coming 8-10 days and
withdraw accordingly.

Prefer
your own bank

If
your bank's ATM is in the vicinity, avoid using another bank's
machine. Even if you have to walk 50-100 feet, your first choice
should be your own bank's ATM. Only if there is no ATM close to you
should you use another bank's ATM. Some banks have apps that can help
you locate their nearest ATM on the smartphone. Make a list of your
bank's ATMs in the areas you frequently visit.Keep
emergency cashKeep
some cash at home in case you run out of money due to unforeseen
expenses. However, don't keep too large an amount in cash. In your
effort to save Rs 20 in ATM fees, you could be losing out more in
interest on that amount. Besides, keeping cash at home is
risky.Start
using dormant account

The
silver lining is that the ATM charges will help revive your dormant
bank account. Most banks charge a small annual fee of Rs 80-100 for a
no-frill debit card. One debit card will allow you 36 transactions on
other banks' ATMs and 60 at your own bank in one year. That is much
cheaper than the charge imposed by your current bank if you exceed
the cap on transactions.Use
SMS, phone banking for non-financial transactions

The
cap on ATM usage includes non-financial transactions, such as balance
enquiry or a mini statement request. Instead of using the ATM for
this, take the SMS route. Most banks offer SMS facility for checking
account balance, mini statements with last five to 10 transactions,
and the status of cheques issued by you.